。
The sun is a circle; the earth is a circle; the well is a circle; the pupil is a circle. And so does the period sign in Chinese.
I have a mixed feeling about this circular punctuation.
It’s perfectly shaped, well-protected, and impenetrable. He is special… Or should I say “she”? You see, even the sex of this punctuation is mysterious. The question mark seems feminine, the exclamation mark seems masculine, and the comma looks like a boy in his puberty。。。I would address it as “she” for now. As I said, the earth is also a circle. And Pachamama means Mother Earth. So, why not.
There is also something about the size she carries that appears powerful to me. Powerful in a quiet way. Or even terrifying sometimes. The space this punctuation occupies is beautifully moderated. A little bit bigger, she would look as arrogant as the question and exclamation mark. A little bit smaller, the empty space trapped by the black line would vanish in eternity.
I rarely use periods when I write in Chinese. In fact, I don’t even remember the last time she appeared in my paper. You might wonder why. Well, she makes everything appear heavier to me. If necessary, I would switch to the English keyboard and use “.” instead.
When I say, “Tonight is the night.” I might be texting my friend about the first rainfall in autumn. And how the rain makes the city look like a scene out of the movie 2049.
But if I say, “Tonight is the night。” My friend would most likely already be on a Uber to my house. Sending a breakup message without the period is the last peaceful attempt. Because everything is not yet sucked into the emptiness within the circle, and the sentence could continue, maybe in a different font. If the ellipse is rainfall that leaves things uncertain, then the period is a tornado that sweeps the uncertainties away.
When I was in primary school, everything was still written on paper. We used grid paper for our literature class, each character fits in one square, including punctuations. "Pencil or pen" was a hard question for me. I liked pencils because it feels smoother, and mistakes are erasable. But as my hand moves on the paper, the lead smudges and blurs the writings. I always feared that my teacher wouldn't like it, and he would make me rewrite the whole page. I used to have a callus on my middle finger. But most of the time, I was writing for corrections. For each incorrect word from the dictation, we need to rewrite it five times. And once, I got 18 words wrong.
Back to the pencil writing. It's impossible to handwrite a perfect period, not to mention that I was always in a rush. My circle was rarely closed, and the blank space leaks out of the gap, running around on my paper. But with just a little right amount of lead smudge, the gap is filled. And the sentence freezes in its position forever。